Is local peer discovery supported by KTorrent? I don’t seem to find any mention of it.
Context
I have a bunch of large torrents downloaded on my desktop, my laptop and my phone; and they’re all configured to seed the data. This is useful for when you have to wipe one of your computers. Instead of downloading everything from the internet (which is slow, and seeders can be rare), you grab everything from a local host (super fast). You get the idea, right?
Well, I had to reinstall Linux on my desktop, and this time I chose to use KDE Plasma. KTorrent was the natural first choice for a torrent client.
Here’s how it happened
With the other peers in the LAN ready and seeding, I fired up KTorrent and started to add all my torrents, one by one. A few of them were downloaded completely within the first minutes, but the peers involved were all remote — my local peers never seeded a byte — and most other torrents just stalled and never got any peers (maybe because I’m the only seeder 
).
I’ve tinkered with many options in KTorrent, such as enabling μTP and DHT (both disabled by default), and also checked the firewall on all systems involved. These changes have increased the number of remote peers — which is good — but local peers still could not communicate at all.
Ultimately, I fired up Transmission and added some of the stalled torrents. Guess what, they were fully downloaded in just a few seconds from my local peers… 
*looks at KTorrent*
Later I found a workaround to this.
- Right-click a stalled torrent, go to Advanced, then “Add Peers”.
- In the dialog, fill in the IP address and port of the local peer.
- Watch as the torrent fully downloads in seconds — from your local peer
